Our amazing trip to Japan, May 2017

We were going to take a trip to the British Isles for our 10th Anniversary but Joan's niece Stephanie moved to Tokyo in February. She just started a job teaching English but had most of this week off and let us know we were welcome to come and stay with her.

We ended up driving to Houston the day of the trip. Had lunch with friends and a short nap at their house. Parked at Houston Intercontinental airport and got onto a small jet to Mexico City.

In Mexico City we had to move our own luggage to another conveyor but that and going through customs wasn't a problem. We boarded the first jumbo jet (a 787) I'd been on in a long time. We shared 3 seats with a nice young woman who had the window with Joan in the middle. The seats were not too bad. With lots of first run movies and me able to get up and walk about a bit, the fourteen and a half hour flight wasn't terrible. We both took a sleeping pill. Although Joan slept for a good portion of the flight, I was only able to manage a couple of hours. We were served two meals and a snack in between. They had a card they showed you that had the food choices. We both had the Japanese meals and they were surprisingly good. It was a tri-lingual flight. All announcements were made in English, Japanese and Spanish. Watching the map brought home how amazing it is to fly 8,500 miles, one third of the way across the globe, in a night.

We landed in Tokyo Narita Airport and had no problems getting our luggage, going through customs and finding the express train into Tokyo where we were to meet Stephanie. It was about 8 am but the 14 hour time difference would catch up with us.

After a nice train ride on an immaculately clean train, which also had a drink machine on it, which amazed me, we made it to Ueno Station and found Steph just where she said she'd be.

We put our luggage into 2 lockers and she took us upstairs into Tokyo. She pointed out a park, a Ramen Noodle place and a few other things. She had to go to work so she said we'd meet up at 6 pm. Due to the fact we were going to get tired way before that she gave us the key and a map with instructions on how to get to her house. We went to explore.



First we explored the beautiful park and a couple of Shrines. One of the first things I noticed was how incredibly clean the city was. Almost NO litter, cigarette butts or anything. Very nice! Nice, friendly people everyplace.





We finally went to the Ramen place. You have to buy a ticket from a machine and we were a bit perplexed. We let a guy and his kids go ahead of us and of course then there weren't any seats left in the tiny place. So we left and went to another one a few door down. After seeing the size of the bowls, I typed a question in Google Translate and after buying one bowl, showed my phone to the cook, asking if we could split one bowl. He was nice and did it for us. Glad we did too, the bowls were still pretty big (and VERY tasty).

We walked around the narrow streets a bit and went into a cool arcade as well.

Eventually though we got tired and retrieved our luggage. We didn't have a problem finding the first train and getting off the correct stop. We weren't so sure of the second train though and asked. Then once on the train, I realized we were going in the right direction. Steph had given us a pretty good map except she showed us her house being right after a store. It wasn't right after it, it was a couple of blocks further. I did try her key on someone elses house, but it didn't even fit into the lock.

We finally found the right place and it felt great to put our bags down (it had been a reasonably long walk from the train station and my huge bag was bottoming out in a few places where the road wasn't that smooth).


Steph's cats, Fanny and Alex were a little nonplussed to have other people in their house, especially Fanny. We relaxed and Stephanie finally came home.

We walked to a neighborhood restaurant that served Okonomiyaki which a friend of mine in Austin had suggested we try. It's a cabbage pancake, cooked by you on a cooking table. We had a short wait at the restaurant and then cooked this incredibly tasty meal. Although Stephanie had tried (and liked it) previously, the server prepared it for us. It was delicious and although we thought we'd never finish it all, it wasn't terribly filling. Just very tasty.

Servers in Japan come when you summon them, either through an electric bell on the table or by gestures. There's no tipping and every place we ate the service was excellent. People take pride in doing a good job in Japan.

After a great nights sleep we got up relatively early and took the train(s) to a beautiful shrine the next day.

Stephanie was quite knowledgeable about Japan, and many customs. Nice to have our own tour guide! I took a picture of an adorable class of little kids, but the teacher crossed her arms (which means no) and I stopped.

We walked around quite a bit. I have back and leg problems from an old injury of often found a place to sit while the women walked around. We had Ramen for lunch again. Really tasty and inexpensive. By the afternoon I was running out of gas and got directions and the key to Steph's house. I took the train home by myself and relaxed for a bit before the ladies came and joined me.

Joan was pretty beat and stayed home while Steph and I went out for dinner at a local restaurant. We went to two that were full and finally got seated at the third. The menu was hand written in Japanese so Stephanie pointed to a few items. They brought  out a little charcoal brazier and two plates of strips of meat. With tongs we cooked our meat, mine quite well done. Very fresh and tasty too with some nice rice.

We had another good nights sleep. Joan had left the States with a pretty nasty cough and it didn't get much better during the trip. The Japanese are much more stingy with energy. An "instant on" hot water heater was over the kitchen sink and in the bath for the shower. No 40 gallons of hot water always heated like the US.

On this day Stephie's friend Mikki, a native, came with us. She was a really sweet woman,

with a huge smile on her face. She took us all over some different neighborhoods. We got to see some very interesting Japanese cemeteries. We had lunch at a very nice cat themed cafe. The hamburger steak lunch  (actually tofu burger), with rice and mushroom gravy was delicious. The cat shaped desserts were great too. I insisted on buying Mikki lunch and she seemed very touched.

At one point, during some shopping, I  showed her Google Translate on my iPhone. I pointed the camera at some Japanese characters on a package and it translated them to English on the screen. She went nuts, screaming like she had seen a ghost. We really had a very nice time with her and were quite tired by the time we got home.

After about an hour at home, the doorbell rang and it was Mikki. She brought us over a gift

of some amazing little cakes (cheese flavored was my favorite).

We went to the Skytree one day. The views of the city were amazing. We got to see the area that shows up in all the movies where everyone crosses the streets from every direction. We did lots of shopping and went back to the fabulous little neighborhood restaurant 2 more times to have cabbage pancakes.

Mikki and her Husband Katsumi picked us up one night at Stephanie's house and drove us to a very nice sushi restaurant in their new Toyota minivan. They drive on the opposite side as the US and the roads are very narrow. The whole time we were in Tokyo I heard about two people barely honk their horns, possibly just to let someone know they were there. Not much like our incredibly nasty US traffic.

Joan and I split a dinner and weren't able to finish it either. Most was excellent, but we didn't like the herring egg sushi and one other piece. We said we wanted to pay for our own, but they sneakily got the check and paid without us even being aware of it. After they took us home, they came back with yet another gift, two beautiful pieces of pottery. We insisted Stephanie keep one after they left. What amazingly nice people.

We went around to quite a few interesting shopping areas, mostly very crowded. We had

some cooked eel and scallops on sticks, but I didn't much care for either, they were a bit too fishy. One lightly fried dough stick with crunchies on it, filled with cream was amazing.

At one point I was sitting on some steps in a very busy shopping area while the women spent money. A young Japanese guy asked me in broken English if I was waiting for someone and I said yes I was. A little while later he brought me a small canned coffee and asked if I wanted to try some sweets from his shop. The niceness of people was frequent and refreshing. Little kids on the train were always looking at me because I was Caucasian, invariably they smiled hugely when I smiled or waved at them.

Stephanie had to go back to work the last two days. We took a couple of trains to the

electric bazaar area. We had a little confusion when we left the train and couldn't find the area at first. Joan told me to ask someone and as I was a little frustrated I told her to ask someone. The thing is when you asked, the people would go nuts trying to help, so neither of us wanted to try. We eventually found it and walked around a bit. We didn't do that much and went back to the house pretty early that day, both of use reasonably tired.

Because of the distance to the airport from Steph's house (over 2-1/2 hours and 3 trains), we had booked a hotel near the airport the last night. We said a sad goodbye to Stephanie as she went to work and got packed.

Mikki and Katsumi came over and walked us

to the train. Then they rode 2 different trains to the 3rd express train to the airport. They made sure we were in our assigned seats and waved (she was crying) as we pulled away. Forty minutes later we were at the airport and took a 20 minute shuttle to the Radisson we had booked. For a Radisson, this hotel was one of the most luxurious I ever stayed out. Our 11th Floor room had a beautiful view. The had cool cotton slippers and kimonos to wear. We had a really nice lunch at the restaurant and walked around the manicured grounds. Dinner was an exceptional buffet that was great and reasonable. The hotel was really quiet and we had a great sleep there.

After a short shuttle ride to the airport, we checked our bags and relaxed. We bought a few

more souvenirs and some ice cream. This Tokyo Narita Airport was possibly the nicest, cleanest airport I've ever seen. There are rooms you can rent by the hour to sleep and shower in.

Finally we boarded and had a pretty comfortable, non-eventful flight home. The plane wasn't that full and we each ended up  with our own 3 seat spread for the 12 plus hour flight. I didn't sleep very well but watched 4 movies. After a short 2 hours in Mexico City, the 2 hour flight back was quick and comfortable. We picked up our car after customs and drove straight home, happy to sleep in our own bed that night.

We both suffered a good amount of jet-lag when we got home. When I researched it I found that generally it's usually worse when traveling East. It took us each a good week to get back to normal.

Some thoughts that I had about Japan:

• Extremely nice and polite people
• People are very clean, well groomed and hardly any are overweight
• Exceptionally clean city
• People dress quite modestly
• People seem to love children and animals very much
• Kids seem very happy and polite
• Drink machines are EVERYWHERE
• Trains and stations are amazingly clean, including the bathrooms
• Yellow panels inlaid all over the city and trains for blink people follow with canes. How amazingly accommodating
• Bidet seats on almost all of the toilets. What a nice thing. We're going to put one in our house.

We got a couple of nice Texas Baseball Caps (one red, one blue) which we mailed to Stephanie, with a copy of "Shogun" for her. The caps are for Mikki and Katsumi, the book for Stephanie. The amazing memories of this fabulous trip will be with us forever.